I'd have put some witty Japanese caption in this image but I haven't installed Japanese Language Support on my laptop. Sadface.

Shock, horror and awe. If you’re a Final Fantasy fan and an Xbox 360 owner, you’re probably eagerly awaiting the release of, um, Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, an Xbox 360 owner and a huge Japanophile, you’re going to be in for a nasty shock.

Find out why after the jump…

Yoshinori Kitase, FF XIII‘s producer, dropped a bomb on IGN when he revealed that the 360 edition of the game would be entirely Japanophile-unfriendly and would ship with English-language voice track only, simply because the DVDs the 360 uses wouldn’t be big enough to hold the Japanese language tracks.

Shock, horror and awe. Again. Let the man speak for himself:

“Obviously, when we talk about XIII it’s for PS3 and Xbox – with PS3 being on Blu-ray there would be enough memory, but on Xbox probably not.”

Now, to most of you, this will not be that big a deal at all. Big whoop, no Japanese audio track, you were going to play it in English anyway.

The thing is, for every 100 nonplussed gamers there’s an angry anime nerd who can’t stand having a compulsory English audio track in their Japanese RPG. We’re talking the ones who watch Japanese anime with subtitles rather than a dubbed voice track, and will rain the hate on Square Enix for dubbing a totally lame-ass audio track over the Japanese lip-syncing.

Of course, there will be some other, probably more noticeable differences between the PS3 and the 360 versions of Final Fantasy XIII; differences in the graphics, frame-rate, audio compression, that sort of thing.

But to those angry, angry 360-owning anime nerds, they’ll all pale in significance when compared to the lack of a Japanese voice track.

Hell, Sony might even sell a PS3 or two out of this! But no more than that. There aren’t that many angry anime nerds out there.

Source: CVG